


questioning

by virginianwolfsnake



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Sort Of, at this point I'm not even sure how much of this is canon, the fact that they went to a forest I think and that's IT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25050697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virginianwolfsnake/pseuds/virginianwolfsnake
Summary: olaf and beatrice begin to ask questions early, in their parallel mission to lemony's own at stain'd-by-the-sea.
Relationships: Beatrice Baudelaire & Count Olaf
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	questioning

Their chaperone was quite right when he said it would be a difficult and unpleasant mission. The smell here is chokingly strong, some awful mix of fish and death and salt, and it is so dark and so dense that, as Beatrice tries to make her way through the forest, she is almost always being tapped or brushed by a leathery, creepy limb of the unnatural plants. The whole forest is constantly shifting and  _ whoosh _ ing, tendrils of seaweed coiling around each other and waving gently in the still air. The ground squelches underfoot with every step as though at the very depths of the forest the sea water has never completely disappeared, and the further in they go, it becomes so dark under the cover of the hulking mass of seaweed that they have to reach for their flashlights. 

Beatrice considers herself quite pragmatic -- she has never been scared of the dark, and she is more afraid of the real-life monsters, who hide themselves in crowds and could look just like her, than she is of any storybook beast -- but there is something foreboding here. Perhaps it is the rank stench of the seagulls snared forever in in the shrubbery, or the way the forest moves as if it has a mind of its own and is plotting something terrible. In any case, she is not frightened yet, but she is approaching it. 

She doesn’t feel like this most of the time, but today she feels very lucky to have a companion. Olaf is a few years older than her and, she supposes, will qualify as a grown man soon -- though it can be hard to remember that sometimes, from the way he acts. He has been tall like a beam for three or four years now, but his shoulders are still so narrow, so he looks a bit like one of the tall seaweed tendrils himself as he strides ahead of her carelessly, shimmying through seaweed gaps where he can find them and hacking a way through with a big knife where he can’t. 

His priorities are all in the wrong order these days, but Beatrice supposes perhaps that’s just what boys his age are like. She knows he is trying to make his way through the forest as quickly as possible so that he can circle them back to the jail to collect Kit, and that he is unimpressed with Lemony for not doing that part himself. Beatrice thinks it is overwhelmingly likely that Lemony has had something else on his mind, especially when he has to deal with that ridiculous chaperone at the same time. Their own is not so bad, but he has perhaps ended up with the wrong students -- or perhaps the wrong students have ended up together in the first place. She and Olaf are a funny pair, and she thinks in many ways that they are too alike to be of much use to each other. He is better at puzzles and very quick on his feet, and Beatrice herself is better at codes and with animals (this has come in useful more often than she might have predicted at the start of her apprenticeship) and they both take a certain joy in disguises -- but neither of them are as outdoorsy as some of their associates, and they are both  _ utterly _ useless with a compass. 

“We’re lost,” Beatrice eventually admits, to herself and to him. 

Olaf pauses a moment from peering into a gap in the seaweed with his flashlight. “Aren’t you supposed to be in charge of the map?”

“There is no map of the forest,” she grumbles. “And I think we may have gone too far east. He said  _ north _ -east.”

“You wait until  _ now _ to mention this?” Olaf exasperatedly lowers his flashlight, so that she can mainly just see the beam of light and not the rest of him, but she can picture the expression on his face all the same -- the same sort of disappointed and resigned grimace she can feel forming on her own. 

“It’s alright,” she assures him -- because the last thing she wants is for him to start sulking, as he often does, in the middle of his hideous forest and thereby prolong their stay. She tugs at his jacket and points toward a slightly different direction with her flashlight, while squinting down at the dim face of the compass. “Let’s just head north now.” 

Olaf sighs so heavily that, even in the dark, she can see his shoulders drooping, but he doesn’t seem to have any better ideas. “Fine. But give  _ me _ that.” She can only assume he means the compass, which suits her fine -- she can hardly see it anyway and is convinced it is faulty from the way it jumps around. “I’ll do the directions from now on.”

Beatrice cannot resist a little sly smile -- and though she is not sure if he can see it, she is certain he knows it is there. “Are you sure about that?” she asks, quite innocently. “It wouldn’t be a very glamorous way to go, lost in this fishy forest. And given your track record with forests, I am not so sure --”

“ _ Hush _ ,” Olaf growls. Kit had laughed for a week over the fact he had gotten them all lost in the Finite Forest on the way to the headquarters and it seems he is still sore about it -- which, of course, is precisely the reason she brought it up in the first place. 

Once he has fumbled toward her, squelching all the while, and they have negotiated the transfer of the blasted compass, they set off again in an adjusted direction, with Beatrice watching the ground and Olaf hacking through the horrible slick weeds. 

“How will we know, anyway?” Olaf wonders aloud, after a few minutes. “What are we even looking for?”

Taken aback, Beatrice shines her flashlight directly at him -- only realising when he flinches and covers his eyes that she probably shouldn’t have. “What makes you think I know any more information than you do?”

“It drives me mad when you answer a question with another question.” He gripes, directing his own flashlight back at her in revenge. “You are picking that habit up from Jacques. I don’t think that, B, but I wasn’t… _ entirely _ listening on the train, so I simply wondered if our instructor had said anything else during the time I drifted off.”

“What a surprise,” she comments drily. Olaf is a capable volunteer; not the best of their generation (that title probably belongs to Bertrand, or perhaps to Kit depending on who you were to ask -- Beatrice is confident that Olaf would argue the latter) but with some useful skills nonetheless. But he squanders whatever his talents might be with his tendency to lose interest or cut corners. “And I am  _ sincerely _ very sorry if I drive you mad.” She is careful to ensure her tone is sharp enough that he will know that she is not sorry at all. “But you can hardly blame me, when there are never any answers.”

“I can if I want to,” he mutters. Then, bending down with his flashlight. “Is this something? We saw one similar a while back.”

When Beatrice bends down to see what he is looking at, he waits until she is crouched deep beside him and balanced on her heels, still staring very intently at the ground with his brow furrowed in concentration -- and it is only when she leans in, closer, closer,  _ closer _ to see what he has found so interesting in a little grimy dark puddle, that he lurches sideways to bump into her and tip her off balance. It is all the more annoying that this isn’t the first time this has happened. 

“You are ridiculous!” she huffs, slipping around in the slimy undergrowth while he cackles. She has dropped her own flashlight in the tumble and has to fish around for it. She is soaked all over one side, so much so that even the ends of her ponytail are wet. “We are supposed to be  _ working! _ ”

She wants to stay angry, but she realises that she is less scared now than she was before -- and finds herself having to tightly purse her lips to stop herself from laughing too. Olaf is doubled over and wheezing at his little prank. 

“You get more morose by the day, Baudelaire. We are too young to actually be working.”

Beatrice doesn’t bother pointing out that he is actually approaching the age that he might be expected to work in the real world, even the young recruitment age for their organisation aside -- primarily because he is still so immature as to be pushing her into puddles and so she can hardly imagine him taking up post as a librarian or schoolteacher. He has barely changed since he put gum in her hair five years ago. 

“No, we’re not,” she corrects instead. “We are part of a noble organisation which wants knowledge to triumph over treachery. You can never be too young to put your skills to use in pursuit of a noble goal.”

By now, Olaf is tired of watching her struggle. He comes back over and pulls her to her feet with one hand, looking around with his own flashlight until he locates her own and her muddied notebook. She reminds herself to hide a spider under his pillow later as revenge. 

“Do you suppose that’s really what we’re doing?” he asks, when they are both upright again and ready to continue their search. 

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re still doing it,” he needles, and then, with a sneaky quirk of an eyebrow. “I’ll push you over again.”

Groaning, Beatrice swats him hard with her muddy notebook and ignores his yelp -- loud enough and dramatic enough that a passerby might assume she had stabbed him rather than brushed him with a few sheets of paper. “Fine; I  _ do _ suppose it. What’s your point?”

“How are we doing it now, exactly?” he mumbles, peeling away the next thick piece of seaweed which has slithered into their way. “In a forest with no chaperone and no coherent instructions, looking for something we aren’t sure of, which will be useful in some way we also aren’t sure of, so long as it is handed to someone we don’t know yet by an undetermined deadline. How do we really know if this is worth doing at all?”

Truthfully, she isn’t sure how to answer that. Kit, she knows, has a plan to clarify things, and this is really a question for her rather than for Beatrice. As usual, Olaf is bored and is trotting out big questions he has heard in other rooms, passing them off as his own -- he gets like this. While Beatrice can agree that she is tired of not knowing the purpose for most of the things they spend their days doing, of her chaperone’s secrecy and of never having a complete picture of the answer at the end of the day, she is also more urgently tired of this seaweed forest, and would like to finish combing through it rather than engage in a debate that she is certain will get them no closer to the answers they all seek. 

“To quote an associate of ours,” she says, in response. “Don’t you think that’s the wrong question?”

Olaf shakes his head. “You did it again.” As they squelch through this brief clearing, relieved not to have the arms of seaweed around their necks, she looks over at him and sees a surprising lack of humour on his face. “Do you always do it when you don’t know the answer?”

Beatrice is saved from having to answer when her foot lands into an unexpected dip in the soft swampy floor. When she turns her flashlight downward, she is shocked to see one of her shoes inside a surprisingly large impression of what looks like a huge, ghastly, clawed hand. 

She is so shaken by her discovery that for a long moment she does not speak, expecting instead that they might both be consumed by the monster in possession of this strange appendage. When she recovers enough to move the flashlight, it alights on a smaller shape nearby, a slimy black creature like a large, deceased slug. 

Olaf has come to a halt next to her too, and looks terrified. “I thought it was supposed to be dead.”

“So did I.” Beatrice whispers. Then, after a few moments of silence designed to listen for any rumbling or buzzing nearby that might suggest that they are actually about to be in the belly of this strange beast, she looks back at him. 

“What were you saying, about this being worthwhile at all?” she breathes, voice shaking despite her best efforts to correct it. In response, he simply nods, face white as a sheet in the indirect glow cast by their torches, and reaches into her satchel for the camera and the net they will use to take the strange slug with them. They are no closer to satisfying answers, but he seems settled for now at least that they have a purpose, even if they are not sure of what it is yet.

  
  



End file.
